Zi'da 1, 718 08:00
The day began much like Aetu’s last hunting trip. She rode her horse out to one of Yaralon’s gates and pulled along her trusty wagon. She’d had a little more luck getting the horse to do what she wanted as of late. Simply learning how to properly put on a saddle made the horse much easier to work with, since it was no longer constantly in pain. Then, after having to pay many merchants for her horse nibbling on their food, Aetu finally realized that she could use food to her advantage. She’d tied a carrot on a stick which she dangled out in front of her horse to make it go where she wanted it to. Every once in a while the horse would get frustrated with being unable to eat, which is when Aetu would let him nibble off a piece. In her wagon she’d brought a couple dozen carrots which would hopefully be enough for her short expedition out into the savannah.
Today she would not be accompanied by her magic mentor, Cane. He’d been feeling a little worse for ware as of late which was pretty typical for someone that was like ninety years old. He imparted Aetu with his grimoire, in which he recorded notes specific to helping her learn the next rune: the Rune of Numbing. It would make for a good read and a way to pass the time as they moved away from the city walls and out to a good hunting spot. Aetu had never succeeded at hunting on her own before but now that she had the knowhow to place umbral traps she was actually expecting to bring home some game.
“Well, off we go,” Aetu muttered as she tied on a fresh carrot and tied the stick to her saddle. She knew that she was a day or more out from finding uncontested game so she pulled out her mentor’s Grimoire and started to read. There was a lot to learn about the rune of numbing, apparently. It was by far the most complicated rune that she’d learned to date. There seemed to be no pattern or meaning to the rune that she could make any sense out of.
With other runes they were easy to picture in her head, and there were little mnemonic devices she’d used for prior runes. For example, the rune of touch was the “O” rune since it resembled the letter O. This one though, it was all over the place. It had an arc that was slightly over half a circle which made it difficult to memorize exactly how far it should go. Then there were two more arcs with the same issue, a check mark, and something that resembled a lightning bolt. Aetu scratched her head and did her best to copy the damn thing down properly. All the motion of the horse constantly trying to bite the carrot was not doing her any favors. “Alright if you want it then I’ll give it to you, ya dumb animal,” she scowled and fed the horse a carrot.
Over the next several hours Aetu would become intimately familiar with drawing the pattern, but she always needed to look at a reference image to make sure she’d drawn it to the correct dimensions. This almost always required a couple alterations, but things were coming along as expected for a difficult rune. When her wrist started to strain, she decided to take a break and flip through more of the book to see what she’d be learning in the future. She had no intention of trying to use or even read much about them, but she was bored and she couldn’t see anything but trees and shrubbery for miles.
“Oh this one looks nice,” she’d say upon reading about the Night rune. Even the Silence rune seemed pretty darn useful. How could your enemy hear you coming if they’d just been blinded or silenced? Most interesting of the bunch though had to be the Rune of Sight. A rune that could let you adjust your sight to see far in the distance or very minute details sounded pretty darn useful. What was even better news was that it was a pretty simple rune to draw. Aetu picked it up rather quickly and was eager to try it out. That being said, she was very wary of doing so. Cane had told her never to try a new rune unless he said it was OK. Aetu had done it before though, with the Rune of Touch and nothing bad had happened at all. She put her finger on her forehead and started focusing her ether through her finger. She was going to do it…
SMUSH
The horse whinnied in alarm as its front two legs were planted in a heaping pile of shit. Another downside of leading a horse with a carrot was that its incentive to look down was pretty nonexistent. Aetu groaned as she hopped off the horse and inspected the poo. It was pretty sizeable. Just needing a butthole large enough to produce these larger chunks was a good indicator that this was a large animal. “Looks like you’ aren’t so useless after all,” Aetu told her horse, “I’ll go investigate. You stay here and try not to get eaten!” She tied the horse to a sturdy tree and started to look around for more signs of a large animal. The poo was pretty fresh so she bet there was one around here somewhere. If she found it before sundown, it’d be the luckiest find of her life.
It didn’t take long to find what had made the poo. There were arrows embedded in trees and a path of crushed shrubbery that were pretty easy to find. The arrows were a good sign that the beast was probably already hunted, but just seeing what animal made that poo would be a good knowledge to have. Peering over the last set of bushes showed a man and a rhino.
Scrambling closer, Aetu was able to see that the rhino had several arrows stuck in its hide. None of the arrows were deep enough to kill the rhino, but they were deep enough to make it very, very mad. The man nocked another arrow and fired it at the rhino, but it just glanced off its hide. This didn’t look all that good for the man. Aetu drew both katana and ran towards the rhino from its side as it charged at the man.
“Argh!” The man’s hip was impaled by the rhino and he was hoisted into the air. But this man was no wimp. He had drawn a knife and dropped down onto the rhino, stabbing it as hard as his body would allow. It didn’t take long before Aetu couldn’t tell who’s blood was who’s.
Aetu finally made it to the fight and used both katana to try slicing into the rhino’s hide with them. She’d never used both katana at once before, but she’d never had to cut through something so thick either. Unfortunately it was too awkward to handle both blades at once so she dropped one of them in favor of a two handed approach. She sliced a couple more times with full strength into the rhino’s hide as it bucked like mad. It didn’t take long for the man to get tossed like a rag doll and for the rhino to finally turn its attention to Aetu.
“Alright big guy,” she muttered with a nervous gulp. She didn’t know anything abut rhinos and she didn’t want to find out if it ate meat or not. If she knew then she’d be able to decide whether to play dead or not. The rhino circled Aetu with a limp then flared its nostrils. Aetu looked at its side and saw that her two handed strikes had managed to cut through the hide. That, coupled with the many punctures from the arrows and the dagger told Aetu that this rhino was probably going to die soon. So, she ran.
Aetu ran faster than she’d ever run before, hearing the footsteps of the rhino beating the ground behind her. The chase climaxed with the rhino scraping its horn against the runewright’s shirt and tearing it off of her. After that, the rhino slowly came to a stop then keeled over. Aetu’s first instinct was to celebrate ‘her’ first kill and bring the food back to the wagon. It was nearly dark and she needed to haul it away if she was going to make it to town by the morning. Then, she remembered the other hunter.
“Damn my humanity,” she cursed as she started jogging back to where the man was. She had to use runes of endurance on her legs to keep going, but she made it. She knelt by the man and saw that he was still breathing. She focused some ether into the man’s back and carefully drew out the rune of numbing and assigned it a sound trigger of a snap. She still hadn’t experimented with applying an umbral rune without a trigger and she wasn’t about to take any major risks. She backed up, snapped her fingers, and saw the man start to relax.
“Good, now I can get to work.”
Continued Here
